natives possessed rude earthenware, but elsewhere in Polynesia eastward of Fiji pottery at that time was unknown; hence the questions naturally arise, Was the art lost, or was it ever introduced? Unlike the Australian aborigines, the inhabitants of New Zealand and Polynesia perfectly understood the use of boiling water in cookery; it seems, therefore, incredible that such a simple and useful art was allowed to perish where there was abundance of material, and that all the widely-scattered sections of the Pacific nations relapsed to the rude and tedious method of boiling by means of heated stones. These questions can only be satisfactorily settled by the careful examination of middens and the sites of ancient settlements. In the north temperate zone rude hunting peoples, unacquainted with the use of metals, manufactured very serviceable articles of clay;* “Antiquity of Man.” Sir C. Lyell. it is therefore difficult to understand the backward state of the art in many of the Malay Islands within a very recent period, unless we can suppose that the various substitutes for pottery which the vegetable kingdom afforded, such as the bamboo, cocoanut shells, and calabashes, checked its development. Kumara, or Sweet Potato (Convolvulus batatas).—From an historical point of view this is the most important plant cultivated by the inhabitants of New Zealand and Polynesia. When Columbus discovered the West Indian Islands he found a sweet potato there in cultivation, and transported it to Spain, from whence it spread to the Philippines, where it received the name “Castilian yam.” The rapid, dissemination of the C. batatas and other New-World species, such as the manioc, maize, and tobacco, amongst the agricultural nations of Africa, before either Arabs or Europeans penetrated into their countries, might lead to the supposition that the presence of the kumara in Polynesia only dated from the time of the American discovery. But we have the positive evidence furnished by Cook that, when he rediscovered New Zealand, and discovered the Hawaiian Archipelago in 1778, the kumara was the cultivated plant on which the inhabitants chiefly depended for food. As neither the New-Zealanders nor the Hawaiians had at that time any intercourse with the outer world, or any definite knowledge of places or people beyond their respective groups, it was impossible for them to have obtained the kumara in the same manner as the negro tribes. From the close resemblance of the name cumar, by which the sweet potato was known in Quito when the Spaniards conquered that country, to the various Polynesian names, kumara, umara, gumara, &c., it has been suggested that the plant found its way into the Pacific directly from South